ISEH consultant on lead role at Games
Dr Mike Loosemore, Lead Consultant in Sport and Exercise Medicine at the ISEH and Lead Sports Physician for the South of England at the English Institute for Sport, is also Chief Medical Officer (CMO) of the England team at the Commonwealth Games. He gave us this exclusive interview before heading off to Glasgow.
ISEH: How big is the medical team you’ll be leading?
ML: We’re taking a team of around 650 athletes and support staff, which is I think the largest team we’ve ever taken to a Commonwealth Games. It will be between us and Australia as to who is the largest. I’ve got a great set of doctors working with me in HQ; our role is really to support the athletes and to support the individual team doctors. The idea is to allow the athletes to perform at their best and try and take away all the other stresses and strains so they don’t have to worry about anything apart from winning medals.
ISEH: Can you tell us about the medical team you’ll be working with?
ML: We’ve got a very experienced team of doctors, including Graham Wilkes, Paul Dijkstra, who is ex-UK athletics CMO, ‘GB’ Ajayi from Imperial and Pippa Bennett, who has worked with gymnastics teams and the Football Association. Then we’ve got Mike Rossiter who works with England hockey and has worked in the past with rugby and football; Stephen Chew, who’s done a lot of work with multi sport games and rugby; and Rebecca Robinson, who is a registrar in sports science medicine. The idea is to have a good mix of expertise and personalities, as well as different levels of experience – we want to give tomorrow’s medical leaders the experience to run the show at future Games.
ISEH: How will you be organised on site?
ML: We’ve been really lucky in that we’ve been able to raise funds for a performance centre called the Lions’ Den. Our team will take up a whole quadrangle of housing (which will become affordable housing after the Games), and the space will include four large temporary buildings where we’ve been able to put in space for training, warm-up, warm-down, recovery, physiotherapy facilities, ice baths, medical facilities and administration. We hope that the whole team will work in that space: all the team physios, the HQ physios, all the team doctors, all the HQ team doctors.
This worked well at the Olympics, to make it feel more like a whole team rather than a lot of individual teams. They are used to going into world and European championships as individual sports teams, but they are all here as Team England. With the medical and physio facility all in one place and right in the centre of the village, it’s in the centre of the England accommodation – it gives that idea of it being one team.
It also gives you a chance to mix. One of the joys of going to multi-sport events is mixing with people from other sports who you may have seen on the TV or you know you may not know about your sport. You can talk to them and you can see them warming up and you can appreciate how hard they have to work. I know that will work well.
ISEH: What about the facilities you will have on offer?
ML: We’ve got a professional clinical area to work in with proper lighting, ultrasound machines and other people around to ask if you’re not sure about something. The whole thing is designed be better than the sum of its parts.
ISEH: Can you tell us about your role of Chief Medical Officer at the Games?
ML: My role is to coordinate the clinical team and to be the final arbiter in any medical decisions. At a big Games like this we work within the framework set up by the Organising Committee. For example, there will be an ambulance service within the village. You know you will be able to call 999 and get an athlete to hospital very quickly if necessary. If they’re not so badly injured then there are established treatment pathways. On the grand scale the injuries we deal with are minor, but in terms of performance we can make an important difference.
Find out more about the Commonwealth Games England team
Find out more about the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games